That night, he woke to a soft whirring. The Kinect, still on his desk, was cycling its tilt motor—left, right, left, right. It wasn’t plugged into anything. Its LED was a steady, unnatural red.
The tablet chirped. A text log appeared: Remote calibration complete. New host detected. Scanning environment.
Leo was a tinkerer, not a gamer. He found an old Xbox 360 Kinect at a garage sale for three dollars, its plastic dusty, the foam padding peeling. The seller said, “It’s junk. No console.”
He pressed it.